Save Time with 8 Great Social Media Management Tools

Having a strong social media presence and keeping in touch with your audiences is a must for successful accounting firms. While most firms are only active on a handful of platforms at the most, that still adds up to a lot of time spent finding and creating content to share, engaging with followers and monitoring analytics reports for each platform.

To help them manage their various profiles without sinking too much time into the process, many successful firms use one or more social media management tools. There are many to choose from, with a wide range of features to streamline a host of different activities. The costs for these tools also vary, with some offering free versions and others that cost a pretty penny. Whatever your needs and budget, you may find exactly the help you want with one of these eight popular tools (in alphabetical order, because they’re all great):

Agorapulse. This social media management package gets high reviews from users for its outstanding reporting features. They’re quite detailed, and accurate enough that firms can feel comfortable making decisions based on the data they contain. Scheduling posts and ad management are other strong features. Agorapulse lets you compare your firm to similar ones in terms of social media performance and run interactive programs like contests and promotions. There’s a lot here, but it costs. Try it out before signing up.

Buffer. This little app doesn’t have the full dashboard capabilities that some other tools offer, but it’s great for scheduling content. The flexibility Buffer offers in this area is exceptional, including the ability to vary your posting times for the week ahead.

Hootsuite. This is one of the most popular social media tools, and for good reason. With free and paid versions, Hootsuite allows users to schedule campaigns on multiple platforms as well as tracking engagement, gauging results and integrating data with Google Analytics and Facebook insights. You can access its features from a phone or desktop.

IFTTT. “If this, then that” is a basic concept we all know. Applied to the social media world, IFTTT allows you to connect certain actions to your social media activity. For example, you can tell it to share all new content from a particular source on Facebook, or post on LinkedIn whenever you create an article. You can coordinate IFTTT rules with both Hootsuite and Buffer, which can be a major timesaver.

Meet Edgar. A relatively pricey tool, Meet Edgar delivers a lot for the money. Larger firms and those with lots and lots of social media activity may find this the most attractive. In addition to tracking updates and scheduling posts, Meet Edgar allows users to create their own content libraries from which to select content for reuse on other platforms and in different ways.

Oktopost. Specifically for B2B marketers, Oktopost will help you generate and track new leads through your social media activity. Its substantial analytic tools allow you to learn which of your profiles and posts on the various platforms are achieving your goals, and which aren’t paying off for the time you invest in them. It’s a paid tool that lacks a free version, but for some users it’s worth the cost.

Social Oomph. Social Oomph is a productivity tool that, as its name implies, adds more power to your social media presence. You can tell it to auto-follow new followers, save and re-use drafts of original content, use it for scheduling tweets and tracking keywords or searching out people to follow. For many of the social media activities you perform often, Social Oomph will save significant time.

Sprout Social. This tool doesn’t offer a free version but you can try it out at no cost to see if you like it. Sprout Social is pretty powerful, offering CRM functionality as well as social media scheduling, analytics and a Unified Smart Inbox designed to help you spend less time handling engagement on your social media platforms.

That’s only a taste of the many social media management tools out there. If none of these are perfect for your firm, don’t worry – there is one that will fit the bill exactly. In a future post we’ll explore some of the best platform-specific management tools, but for right now have fun checking these out.

Sarah Warlick is responsible for making us and all of our clients sound professional and eloquent as the content director at bbr marketing. In this role, Sarah is in charge of ensuring that all copy is well-written, accurate and free of pesky typos before it heads out the door. Additionally, she is a prolific writer and a frequent contributor to bbr marketing’s blog sites. She spends a good deal of time writing copy for our clients and has a unique way of crawling into our clients’ heads to create ghostwritten copy that sounds as if it came directly from their pen.

A Top 100 Accounting Blog

About Marketing Ideas for CPAs

This blog was created to provide tips, analyze trends and share ideas to help you market your accounting firm. Whether you are a marketing professional, a firm administrator, a partner or a sole practitioner, we encourage feedback and ideas, so feel free to reach out to us at any time. We want Marketing Ideas for CPAs to be a community where the accounting marketing profession comes to learn and interact with peers.

Subscribe

Subscribe to our mailing list

Join the MIFCPAs LinkedIn Group

Join in the fun and become a member of the Marketing Ideas for CPAs LinkedIn Group. With new members joining daily, you'll have the opportunity to chat with and bounce ideas off of other professionals in the accounting marketing arena. Join Here!